The ACTA juggernaut continues to roll ahead, despite public indignation about an agreement supposedly about counterfeiting that has turned into a regime for global Internet regulation. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has already announced that the next round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations will take place in January — with the aim of concluding the deal "as soon as possible in 2010."

In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th. EFF will be sending our own submission, as will many other IP and disability groups. But if you've worked on software or hardware to overcome your own visual or other disabilities, or co-operated informally (perhaps in an open source project) to provide wider access to content for users with disabilities, or have dealt with a publisher regarding the accessibility of texts, we'd like to encourage you to send the copyright office your own stories — and cc: us at accessibility@eff.org.

A crucial meeting that will determine the future of the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty has been underway this week at WIPO. WIPO' s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights was scheduled to meet from 18-21 June, and then hold a Preparatory Conference on June 22, to agree the rules for the Diplomatic Conference scheduled for November. But at 8:45 pm last night, the U.S. delegation took the floor and said that it did not support moving forward to a Diplomatic Conference this year, on the grounds that there was so little agreement on a proposed text and key elements of what a Broadcasting Treaty should contain. Many Member States agreed that there was no prospect of coming to a consensus by week-end, including Brazil, India and the Africa Group.

Discussions on streamlining ? or what some delegates are describing as ?downsizing? ? the set of 71 proposals into a shorter ?actionable? list are proceeding fairly expeditiously. The Chair, the Ambassador of Barbados, Trevor Clarke, is running this week?s meeting in much the same way he ran the last PCDA meeting in February. The 71 proposals are listed in Annex B to a report prepared by the Chair of the 2006 WIPO General Assembly, (the Manalo report) (see here and here), and are grouped into 6 clusters. Prior to this week?s meeting, the Chair assigned each Regional Group of countries the task of synthesizing a particular cluster of proposals.